3D for the real world

http://matterport.com/

by waterlooalex • 12 years ago

44 17 12 years ago

matterport.com

waterlooalex• 12 years ago

I want this + something to preview paint, furniture and renovation changes to my home!

letstryagain• 12 years ago

Can anyone recommend some open source code to experiment with at home? Maybe fed by Google Tango or Microsoft Kinect?

fantanfantan• 12 years ago

If you have a kinect with a usb adapter you can try out microsoft's kinect sdk. There are a lot example apps including several 3d scanning ones (called kinectfusion I think?).

Svenstaro• 12 years ago

http://pointclouds.org/ has a subproject called (http://pointclouds.org/documentation/tutorials/using_kinfu_l...) that you can feed with a kinect or a similar device. It's quite fun!

philmcc2• 12 years ago

I am a little taken aback by their pricing strategy, or maybe I'm misunderstanding it.

If you purchase this, you have to pay (at least) $500 a year, for hosting, and $20 per scan, if you scan more than (say) 6 times in a month?

cleversoap• 12 years ago

I too was confused but then I realised this isn't meant for fun hacky 3D-mapping. It's meant to sell stuff for the home and I think that's unfortunately going to limit the reach of this technology. The only third party type of business that might be able to make use of this is a real estate company for obvious reasons. I guess they have a public API that can pull the data but even then that requires somebody with the camera to upload your house.

I highly doubt IKEA or any other furniture store is going to bring their camera out to me just so I can then digitally place a few sofas and I'm not going to pay $500 just to... what... save me a trip to the returns department? If I bought it what happens when I'm done decorating? Does my camera become a useless $500 paperweight?

It's cool that they allow you to have an OBJ (UV maps and textures too?) - I assume that doesn't include whatever proprietary meta-data gets attached to denote walls, floors, et al. If I could get the mesh with just the camera I would buy one of these in a heartbeat but otherwise I don't see this being used by any consumer apart from the absurdly obsessive renovator.

philmcc2• 12 years ago

Right? Except it's not a $500 paperweight. It's a $4,500 paperweight with an additional $500 a year overhead.

Depending on how effective Project Tango is, this technology might be short lived. Maybe there's some manual labor that has to happen on their end before your files are ready? Otherwise I just don't understand the cost. Storage and bandwidth couldn't possibly cost $50/mo.

Sometimes I really do lament the fact that everyone decided that an ongoing subscription model is the way to go for everything.

sonnyhe2002• 12 years ago

This is like Paracosm.io

flog• 12 years ago

I'm surprised there hasn't been more improvement in the scans - I would think given the restricted domain of interiors it'd be possible to straighten out edges and things.

muhuk• 12 years ago

Yes, and since everything is triangulated too early (it seems) there's no level-of-detail. The scan in the video looks like puke. The scan that plays in the background when you load the page first looks much better.

sourkremlin2• 12 years ago

Yes. The thing that sticks out the most to me is the poor treatment of edges. One possible reason the edges look bad is that meshing algorithms that take into account sharp edges can produce unrealistic mesh topologies that are difficult to work with. Bad mesh topologies can wreak havoc on some operations like texture mapping, which they obviously use quite heavily. There are algorithms that can clean this up, but it is a messy and computationally intensive business.

Or it could just be poor data from the scanner -- that would be unfortunate. Some of the artifacts are so bad that it would seem to suggest that this is the case (the corner of the countertop in the kitchen is quite bad, or the protrusion in the wall above the entry-way into the kitchen, for some examples). It's hard to tell from looking at the processed result. I wonder what the raw scans look like.

Very cool product though, even if it's rough right now. I can see this looking nice in the future.

31reasons2• 12 years ago

It doesn't look ready for consumers. The scans looks like lumps of clay. Shouldn't it look exactly like the spaces it scans ? Thats what scanners do. When I scan a document, it gives me pretty sharp copy. I wouldn't pay for scanner that give me very fuzzy copy of a document, at least i would not try to sell it until i perfect it.

sourkremlin2• 12 years ago

When you scan a document, it produces a two-dimensional image. This is producing a traversable three dimensional space. It's a very different problem for so many reasons, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect the same fidelity in the result in the near future.

31reasons2• 12 years ago

As a consumer I don't care how difficult it is for you to implement it. Its the harsh reality of the consumer market.

msie• 12 years ago

Camera looks like three Kinect sensors.

nickthemagicman• 12 years ago

This is so cool. I want to be able to build clay sculptures and convert them to blender or CAD files then rig/animate them.

stuaxo• 12 years ago

This is cool, I note the video is part of the trend for voices to sound more robotic.

3D for the real world

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